29 May 2014

CHIAVARI,
Italy - Calabriais a rugged region in the
most southern part of Italy, set between two seas, theTyrrhenian and Ionian, and the Appenine mountains.
There are many delicious dishes that come out of Calabria, and one of the stars
of the Calabrian cuisine is the red onion of Tropea, a town in the province of
Vibo Valentia.

The Port of Tropea

The
red onions of Tropea are so sweet and crisp you can eat them raw in a simple
tomato salad dressed with local olive oil. They are also incredibly delicious
when cooked to a soft sweetness and put together with Calabria’s favorite pasta,
which is called fileja. Fileja is still
made by hand in many Calabrian kitchens. It’s a time consuming process as each
piece of dough must be wrapped around a wire, a ferretto in Calabrese dialect, to
give the fileja its unusual shape. Most of the ferretti in use today have been
handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, as it is the women who keep
this tradition alive.

Hand Made Fileja

My love affair with pasta and onions began a
long time ago, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned that this fast
and simple dish was a classic Calabrian recipe Calabrese grandmothers have been
making for hundreds of years. Tropea onions are not always in the market, but
this week they are.

Locals
in Tropea claim that these onions are so delicious that one of the town’s gelateria
makes “cipolla di Tropea” gelato. I not entirely convinced onion gelato is a
good idea, but I may be wrong. They also make squid ink gelato and gelato
flavored with a spicy salami called nduja. Those flavors might be good but I
think I’ll pass up the gelato and stick
with pasta and onions, thank you.

Peel
the onions , cut them in half and then in half again in the other direction
this time . Slice each piece into thin slices.

Stick
a toothpick in whole clove of garlic. In a large skillet heat the olive oil
over medium heat, add the onions and after a couple of seconds add the garlic
and onions. Mix together gently.

The
onions don’t take long to cook so this is a good time to put a pot of water on
for the pasta. Salt the water, cover the pot and increase the heat.

Back
to the onions. Cook them for a few minutes and then add a pinch of salt , a big
pinch of black pepper and white wine. Stir well, cover and cook for about ten
minutes. Check the onions now and again to make sure they do not dry out.If all the liquid has evaporated, you can add
a ladle of the cooking water from the pasta.

After
cooking the onions become soft . Taste them to see if they need more salt and
then take out the garlic clove . Combine the grated cheese and
stir it into the onions. For a vegan pasta with red onions do not add the
cheese, you can add chopped parsley if you like.

Add
the pasta to the sauce.

Serve
with a glass of white Calabrian wine and you have a feast fit for a king – or
queen.

Suggestion:
Try using whole wheat pasta for this recipe, it’s a good combination.

25 May 2014

CHIAVARI, Italy – This is
Memorial Day weekend and just like the United States, America’s fallen heroes
will be honored in Italy too. The only difference is that they will be honored
by the very people they were liberating when they sacrificed their lives for
the sake of their freedom. The ceremonies will take place at the two American military
cemeteries in Italy, one in Anzio and the other in Florence.

Sicily Rome American Cemetery and Memorial, Nettuno (Anzio), Italy

The idea of American
military cemeteries started after World War I. Given the number of soldiers
killed on all sides, the U.S. did not know what do to. How could they bring so many bodies back to the United States? They
also had to figure out a way to commemorate the reason these men died, as well
as their sacrifice. So an idea was developed to establish cemeteries overseas,
and let the soldiers become the monuments to their service.

Families of deceased World
War I soldiers were given choices regarding the remains of their loved ones. They
could choose to have them buried overseas in cemeteries with perpetual care, or
returned to a national cemetery or family grave site, or have their loved ones
remains shipped somewhere else in the world and be responsible for the funeral
costs. About 20% of families chose the first option, overseas cemeteries.

Memorial Day Services, Camp Darby, Livorno, Italy

According to the American
Battle Monuments Commission there
are 24 cemeteries in foreign lands where nearly 125,000 service men and women are
buried. The Florence American Cemetery and Memorial is one of them. It is in the
outskirts of Florence, Italy, next to an ancient Roman highway, the Via
Cassia.

This cemetery holds 4,402 of
our military dead. Some are the men and women who died in Italy during the last
days of World War II, a fight that ended on May 2, 1945 when the last of the enemy
troops were surrounded and captured in northern Italy. But most of them died in
the fighting that took place after the liberation of Rome in June 1944. These
dead Americans represent 39 percent of the total U.S. Fifth Army’s burials.

Florence American Cemetery and Memorial, Florence, Italy

Ex-servicemen and women are drawn to this cemetery to honor those who
have served and died in a cause they believed in. The band of brothers is more
than just a line from a movie, it is the bond soldiers feel toward each other that
only they truly understand. And even though their “brothers” are in a cemetery,
those bonds are still strong.

At the Florence American
Cemetery there also are over 1,400 names on marble slabs called “The Tablets of
the Missing”. Those stone markers have
no names on them and are marked only with the sorrowful phrase “Here Rests in Honored
Glory a Comrade in Arms Known But to God.” These are the unknown soldiers who
have been buried with their comrades. Their families only know that they died, but
not where they are buried.

Florence American Cemetery and Memorial, Florence, Italy

The second American cemetery
in Italy which honors the heroes of World War II is the Sicily-Rome American
Cemetery and Memorial. It is located in Nettuno, Italy, near Anzio in the
province of Lazio.

The Sicily-Rome American
Cemetery and Memorial covers 77 acres. There are 7,861 American military war
dead here, their graves form gentle arcs on the wide green lawns shaded by
Roman pine trees. Most of these men died in the liberation of Sicily, which
took place from July 10 to August 17, 1943, and in the landings at Salerno of
September 9, 1943, and the heavy fighting during the landing at Anzio Beach,
which started in January 22, 1944 and didn’t end until May of that same year.

Sicily Rome American Cemetery and Memorial, Nettuno (Anzio), Italy

At the Sicily-Rome American
Cemetery, there is a wide central mall that leads to the Memorial. The names of
the 3,085 whose bodies were never found, are engraved on the white marble walls
of the chapel. The names of those whose bodies have since been recovered and
identified are marked with rosettes. In the map room there is a bronze relief
map and four fresco maps that show the military operations in Sicily and Italy.
At each end of each section of the memorial there are carefully tended
ornamental Italian gardens.

The American cemeteries in Italy
are cared for by the very people that the men who are buried here liberated.
These cemeteries hold the stories, great and small, of Americans who
volunteered to march long miles with little sleep and in desperate conditions and
in the end lost their lives. The sacrifices they, and their families, made are
not forgotten by the Italians, and never will be.

22 May 2014

CHIAVARI, Italy - Even before the
idea for this blog was fully developed, I knew I wanted the Auntie Pasta page
to be about food, but not necessarily about recipes. Since then I have included
some recipes on this blog, and in going through my collection the
other day, I found there were other recipes that I would like to share with you as
well.

Where it all Began - Piansano, Italy

What got me thinking about
recipes was a review of new cookbooks in the New York Times, including one
cookbook that claims to teach you what your grandmother didn’t. Grandmothers
seem to play an important part in the cooking lives of a lot of people,
including me.

My Grandmother was a goddess in
the kitchen. I can still taste her tripe in tomato sauce with that perfect hint of nutmeg, her crisp roasted chicken
with lemon and the roasted potatoes she served with it, the plump Roman
artichokes stuffed garlic slivers and mintuccia from the old country and the
list goes on. Yet I never saw her open a cookbook. In fact I don’t think
there were any cookbooks in her house. She just seemed to know what to do.
Like most women of her generation, she learned to cook when she was a kid by watching and doing
what she was told.

As you can imagine, preparing food was serious
business in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, there wasn’t a lot of it and
there was no messing around in the kitchen. She carried that philosophy with
her to the New World as a young bride and mother, and when she told me to watch
the pot of simmering snails on the stove and make sure none of them escaped,
you’d better believe my five year old eyes were glued to that pot lid.

Culinary Training 101

By the time I was given the
responsibility of guarding the snails, I had eaten, and helped prepare all types
of greens, tripe and octopus, rabbit and venison, I had rolled meatballs, cut
fresh pasta into strips of fettucine, chopped parsley and knew the difference between
regular mint and the mintuccia that Aunt Mary sent from Italy. I was a
cook in training, I just didn't know it.

Sometimes it was difficult not to
start playing with the gooey mess that water and flour make before it becomes
pasta dough, or pressing ground meat around my ten little fingers and playing
an imaginary hamburger piano. Bit it didn't take much to keep me in line though;
a look would usually do the trick. I guess that was the culinary discipline part of my
training.

When I was a young bride I would
often call my mother and ask her for recipes. She was not a patient person and
her instructions were short and to the point. Sometimes I would get recipes
from my aunts, scribbled on scraps of paper with vague proportions and
approximate instructions. They were my mentors, and even though I was young and
had a lot to learn, they treated me as an equal, cooks talking to another cook.

You Get a Little Bigger - You Do a Little More

Long before Gourmet Magazine and
Food and Wine, before Julia Child made culinary history with her French Chef
television series, and long, long before the advent of celebrity chefs, that is
how we all learned to cook.

A certain amount of knowledge was
always assumed and the key points of a dish were often all you needed, i.e.
clean and boil the artichokes before you season them and then put them in the oven to
bake. It was usually the small, but crucial, details that resulted in being able to eat what you have cooked rather
than throw it away. My first solo flight into the wonderful world
of artichokes was proof of that. Leaving out the "boil them first" part resulted in total disaster. But I learned.

Easy Peasy Merluzzo ai Capperi

Now that I live in Italy I like
to try the recipes I find on the back of boxes of pasta and packages of things
I buy, but I’ve hesitated to include them in this blog because the instructions
are often vague and the measurements not just approximate, but sometimes in code.
But now I think I’m wrong about that. You are cooks and if we speak cook to
cook, I think it will all work out. With that in mind, here is a Sicilian fish
recipe that uses frozen codfish, but you can use any firm, white fish, fresh or
frozen.

Defrost the fish. Chop a bunch of
parsley and two garlic cloves. In a frying pan heat 3-4 tablespoons of olive
oil and when it is barely hot, add half of the chopped parsley, garlic and the
fish. Season with salt and pepper. When the fish filets have cooked on one
side, turn them over. Add ½ glass of dry white wine and when it has evaporated
add a can of chopped tomatoes.

Codfish with Capers

Let the fish and tomatoes cook
for about 15 minutes and then add the remaining parsley and garlic, a pinch of
dried oregano and two teaspoons of capers. Cook for an additional 5 minutes.
The recipe suggests serving the fish with mashed or boiled potatoes but I
prefer serving it with white rice.

Three short suggestions: (1) use capers Don't leave them out; (2) use capers
that have been preserved in brine, not in salt, and rinse them well; and (3) I
found that if you fry a sliced onion in the olive oil before you add the
parsley, garlic and fish, it gives the dish another (tasty) layer of flavor.

18 May 2014

CHIAVARI, Italy – You have
to admit Ravenna isn’t exactly a household name, and chances are no one is going to swoon if
you tell them you are going to Ravenna on your next trip to Italy. What you’ll
probably hear is, “where’s that”. And if you tell them it’s on the Adriatic
side of Italy, a couple of hours from Bologna, you’ll most likely get a grunt.
If that.

Life is Easy in Ravenna

But in that little city of
about 135,000 you are going to find treasures, the likes of which you have
never seen before. The treasures are in the form of mosaics, which may not
sound like such a big deal but they are enough of a big deal to be on UNESCO’s
World Heritage List.

There are lots of mosaics in
Italy, most of them are beautiful, complicated and detailed and date from the 2nd
century BC. The mosaics in Ravenna date from the fifth and sixth centuries and
were created in that brief window of time when the city was the capital of the
Roman Empire.

Most of the Mosaics are Religious

Some of the mosaic art in
Ravenna was already almost a thousand years old when Dante, that’s Dante
Alegheri of The Divine Comedy fame, arrived here in 1318 after being expelled from
Florence. He never left. His tomb is here if you care to visit it.

It’s a miracle the Ravenna
mosaics have survived this long when you think about the disasters that have
occurred since they were created. The most recent disasters were the World War
II bombings by both American and British planes that flattened other buildings
in Ravenna, but somehow the mosaics were spared.

Eglise di St. Vitale

The Ravenna mosaics are in
churches and chapels and one mausoleum, so it’s no surprise that the subject
matter is mostly religious. But it’s not the subject matter that interests
visitors, it the color and form that those long ago artists were able to
achieve. Some say the artisans were Greek, but truly no one knows who they
were.

The most important stop in
Ravenna is the Basilica of St Vitale. The Basilica of St Vitale is not your
standard 6th century rectangular church building, and the mosaics
inside are beyond extraordinary. They tell the story of Justinian, the
Byzantine Emperor along with saints and prophets and stories from both the old
and new testaments. Even the non-mosaic trim on the columns and arches looks
like the geometric patterns that showed up later in great mosques around the world.

The Baptism of Christ

The Arian Baptistry looks
like a little outbuilding next to the larger Church of the Holy Spirit. The
church lost its mosaics a long time ago, but in the baptistery you see a mosaic
depiction of Christ being baptized by John the Baptist. Reaching out from the
central scene are the 12 apostles, separated one from the other by date palms. Don’t
be surprised if you see people laying flat on their backs, taking in the mosaic
art one apostle at a time. It’s common here.

St. Apollinare is the patron
saint of Ravenna, even though his church is in the town of Classes, about three
miles away.The story is he went to
Classe to convert the locals, mostly merchants and sailors, and they built a
church here to honor him. The most spectacular of all the mosaics in this
church are the glittering mosaics of the presbytery, apse and triumphal arch
which date from the 6th to the 12th century.

St. Apollinare in Classe

There are more mosaics to
see, but you don’t have to see them all. Not that they are not worth seeing,
they most certainly are, but so is the town. It’s compact, and just about
everything worth visiting is a just a short walk from any part of town. You’ll
notice most of the historic center is pedestrian
only so there will be a lot of people walking around town or riding bicycles. It’s
a pretty laid back place, no one ever seems to be in a hurry, which is nice.

And don’t forget you are in
the province of Emilia Romagna, which according to Italians has the best food
in Italy. Honest, they do say that. And it’s easy to understand why when you
think of the towns in Emilia Romagna, towns like Parma, Modena and Bologna and
their extraordinary local products and dishes. They make everything from
Parmigiano-Reggiano, balsamic vinegar, prosciutto di Parma, culatello,
mortadella, tortellini, lasagna and so much more.

Ravenna is a treat for your
eyes as well as your tummy, and it’s a great place to kick back and relax and
do something a little out of the ordinary that will make your visit to Italy just a little bit more
special.

About Me

Hi,my name is Phyllis Macchioni and I’m a free lance writer.
My articles have been published in the Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Chicago Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Pittsburgh Gazzette, Women's Wear Daily and other Conde Nast publications. My articles have been translated into Italian and Arabic.